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How long does search engine cache last?

Not sure if this is the right forum to post under, but I was wondering if anyone knows the answer: when you delete a web page, it still exists as a search result because the page has been cached by the search engine (e.g. google). How much time must pass before it will no longer show up as a search result and effectively "disappear"?

A search engine, e.g. google, takes a snapshot of the webpage, while indexing.
When you remove or shut down your webpage, and you want its content removed
from the cache, you should contact the search engine, e.g. google[1].

But, there are other ways: You can prevent google from returning cached versions,
by using the NOARCHIVE[2] meta-tag. During the index update, this will become
active. The frequency of the spider visiting your page however, depends on a number
of parameters and is not fixed. Furthermore, you can restrict spiders by configuring
robots.txt[3] on your server.

Note, that waybackmachine.org[4] may have a lot of snapshots stored...
By some settings in the robots.txt file, you can remove those entries,
however, read the FAQ on the page: